I was sifting through a backlog in Google Reader this morning when this image, taken by Chip Carey, popped up on Dougald MacDonald’s Mountain World Blog. It’s John Trudgen, who was multi-time heavyweight ski champion through the 1970s.
Dougald comments: ‘this is one of the most inspiring ski photos I’ve ever seen‘, and I tend to agree. I can’t imagine the heavyweight ski championships are like the heavyweight boxing championships in terms of recognition and rewards. I mention this because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivations. It seems that it’s one thing to push yourself when you know you will get a lot of recognition from it – say for example an Olympic medal – but it’s another entirely when any recognition will be negligible.
To me it seems these stories are almost more interesting, inspiring and admirable. Some people need to battle through their entire lives just to survive.
I’ve been meaning to post this for a while. I think it’s exceptional in lots of ways.[click out to full screen for best effect]
”In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).”
One of the main reasons I started blogging was to form some kind of catalogue of inspirational things I come across. Being a great believer in the emerging ‘open source’ way of working, I like the idea that keeping an open sketchbook allows much opportunity for collaborative work and solutions to come forward. With this in mind I’m going to make more of an effort to post ‘in homage’ to the things I feel are worthy of mention, starting with the work of Jimmy Chin.
I don’t think it’ll take you long to realise why his work is worthy of mention, but for me, what comes through is his personality. I get the impression he is never trying to impose himself on the situation, and therefore the result is something which both un-contrived and beautifully effortless. In this day and age it’s great to see such strong content that relies so little little on digital manipulation. Check out Jimmy’s website and blog.
After several years deliberating backwards and forwards, a nudge from Father-of-Schmo finally got us in gear to pull a new website together for MK Whistles. I was amazed by the speed with which it came together, something which could be attributed to the strength of the Wordpress platform. You may not have heard of Wordpress before, but if you surf the internet at all you’ve almost certainly come across it, if perhaps unknowingly. Wordpress basically makes it possible for the layman to publish to the internet without much technical knowledge at all. It’s speed of development has been frightening, largely because it’s been run as an Open-Source project – with a worldwide community of people all working on and sharing their developments. Collaborative Open source methods of working have a huge future.
For the purposes of this project it meant that we managed to get the website up and running pretty efficiently. Check it out if you get a chance >>
I finally managed to finish the design for the display stand – something that took considerably more effort than it perhaps should have. I find so many ideas start out simple, but developing these ideas adds layers which give it depth, but also erodes the simplicity of the original idea. I find latter stages almost always involve whittling things back to capture the freshness of the original idea. This is certainly something that I’ve found holds true in any of the creative fields I’ve worked in – music, design, writing, photography, but then this might also be an approach which is specific to me – after all, if we all approached creating things the same way, then the chances are we wouldn’t come up with much creative!
This display stand has been designed as a point of sale to display musical instruments. I originally all the profiling of the material cut by the amazing process waterjet cutting – a high pressure stream of water which can cut through most things including metals, wood and stone. As you can probably imagine the foam and ali used on the stand didn’t cause it too much problem. The waterjet however couldn’t replicate the detail as seen on the top plate, and so laser profiling emerged as the best way to do this – more expensive but able to handle fine detailing much better. Both processes pretty new to me, it was a really interesting project to work on and should open up some doors in the future.
Dougald comments: ‘this is one of the most inspiring ski photos I’ve ever seen‘, and I tend to agree. I can’t imagine the heavyweight ski championships are like the heavyweight boxing championships in terms of recognition and rewards. I mention this because I’ve been thinking a lot lately about motivations. It seems that it’s one thing to push yourself when you know you will get a lot of recognition from it – say for example an Olympic medal – but it’s another entirely when any recognition will be negligible.
